Bucknell University Press

Frieda Ekotto is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and currently serves as the chair of the department of Afroamerican and African studies.  Her early work involves an interdisciplinary exploration of the interactions among philosophy, law, literature, and African cinema. Don’t Whisper Too Much was first published by French publishing house L’Harmattan in 2005, and was translated by Corine Tachtiris to make Don’t Whisper Too Much and Portrait of A Young Artiste from Bona Mbella, published by Bucknell University Press in 2019. In February, I was allowed the privilege to ask Professor Ekotto a few of my own questions about her stunning works.

How do you begin a new work? What is your process for beginning a new project?

I would like to write all the time but it is impossible because of my work as a professor.  
Writing fiction is my solace. It really helps me on a daily basis. It is like reading. If I do not read a piece of a story every day, I feel like the world is empty. I have so many ideas, I want to put them down. Therefore, as soon as I have a little bit of time, I articulate an idea in order to come back to it for either a short story or a novel. Writing fiction allows my imagination to fly all around me.

These works were first published in French, and you’ve stated before that the publishing process for Don’t Whisper Too Much had its challenges.  What was that like, and what is your take on how the publishing industry should intersect with the lives and stories of underrepresented groups?

In the novel Don’t Whisper Too Much, I really wanted to talk about love between women. How women can love each other.  It is difficult to talk about love. We usually talk about stories on love and sacrifice in a visual poetry full of sensuality and emotion.  Aesthetically, I wanted to focus on the bodies, the loving body as such: the two main characters Affi and Siliki work on the different movement of the body, disabled body that moves very slowly, dreaming, thinking, loving, speaking and body escaping confinement of sexual body. This will allow me to work on the new framing of presenting the African female body: a different gaze, an African gaze as well as an aesthetic on slowness of the way these bodies move.  These two main characters move slowly with the focus on the face, on specific parts of the body, faces, eyes, private parts. In a closed door I wanted to show intimacy as well as spaces of resistances, an opening to escape confinement as well as conditions of possible freedom, which symbolize the openness, alterity and mostly tolerance. Aesthetically, I seek to invent a writing form to allow openness, possibilities, and forms of breathing necessary for freedom to be.  In other words, create a narrative that renders plausible form of objectivity, a poetic message, something purely fictional that would affect souls. Don’t Whisper Too Much traverses different life stories and histories, trajectories dealing with time and feelings of issues fear and desire.  The characters Affi and Siliki’s stories relate to suffering of many women as well as other humans with alternative voices.

Have the responses from your English readers differed in any way from your original audience?

Yes.  There is a tradition within the Anglo-Saxon world of already well-established homosexual writers. Here my inspiration is James Baldwin. His work is about love and this is what I want to reproduce within the continent of Africa. The translator of this work wrote an excellent article on the process of translating my work. See: Corine Tachtiris “Giving Voice: Translating Speech and Silence in Frieda Ekotto’s Don’t Whisper Too Much.” This piece is useful for teaching. My work is important because it is a different voice, a voice coming from another space. In general,  readers love to discover voices from far away like those coming from Africa. Our continent is a huge one with diversity of cultures and languages, therefore, I want to add my voice to the multiple voices defining ourselves, writing ourselves and our stories in world literature.

Why choose to have Don’t Whisper Too Much and Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbella together in a single volume?  How do they speak to one another?

Don’t Whisper Too Much is remarkable not just for being arguably the first African novel to deal frankly with women who love women but also in that it is very “non-confrontational” for a general African audience.  There is a lot of love, intimacy, and desire, but nothing that could be called pornographic or even overtly sexual. This was a conscious decision to gain traction with a wider, even more conservative audience. In these two novels, there is a stylistic continuation of what I can do in my work, a specific desire to take a different approach to representing women who love women in an African context. In any case, I think the content of these short stories and their raw power are completely different from the first novel. Yes, my ideas are inflammatory because I want readers to note that this is a different world.

Within the first few pages of Don’t Whisper Too Much, you write that “Silence permeates every relationship.”  In the introduction of Don’t Whisper Too Much, Lindsey Green-Simms claims that “Writing, then, allows Ekotto to carve out spaces within this confinement to ‘pierce the imperceptible layer of the unsayable and slide through the cracks.’”  What does this mean for you? How does silence affect your work?

As a postcolonial subject, silence is part of how we are in the world. My desire is to write in my mother’s tongue, but this is impossible, so I translate part of what I cannot say into silence. My major question is how to translate Other’s silence.  It is important for me that the voices of ‘Others’ be heard and not silenced by being squeezed into or ignored by so many dominant discourses or what Jean François Lyotard called “master narrative.” This means that our attempts to “explore the ‘Other’ point of view” and “to give it a chance to speak for itself” must always be distinguished from the other’s struggles.  In my case, this means that I speak from the position of a postcolonial subject and that my speech can be localized within the postcolonial context despite the logical inconsistencies propelling it. I also know, however, that it is necessary for me to first master my own language before attempting to appropriate the master’s discursive control over language. Derrida discusses the question of the other’s language in Racism’s Last Word,  pointing out that one must master how to “speak the other’s language without renouncing [our] own.” In other words, translating silence is like facing ‘a wall,’ therefore to speak or to learn how to speak means to find a hole and then the wall will tumble.  In fact, I am only reminding Africans that it is about time to learn how to speak, to find a hole for themselves, for their history to be heard. I am quite aware of the cultural implications for a silenced voice who seeks “to learn to speak to (rather than listen to or speak for)” in this particular global context. But what is crucial to understand here is not that the silence cannot be translated, but instead, that we include the necessary conditions for its translation not to be “only” localizable in the same margins of its contestation of liminality and exclusion. Translating silence is also reformulating agency that not only resists, but one that traces the teleologies of an alternative, a kind of new culture. It is within this space that I can speak of how translation of silence engenders the inscription of my subjectivity. It is also not necessary to translate silence all the time because it is the condition for so many people. Silence protects me and I am always careful how I want to uncover it.

If readers were to take one thing away from your work, what would you want that to be?

I would be very happy if readers understood the humanity of my characters who are dealing with same-sex love. To tell a story is a creative component of human experience.

I strongly believe that literature or other forms of creativity can help change attitudes in the continent of Africa on queer identities. Same-sex desire and sexual relationships between women in Africa have received scant attention in critical and cultural studies. Thus it is extremely important that we examine how homosexuality is used as a discursive tool, both in Africa and in the West that affects lives. Films and literary texts shape ethical reflection and cultural norms.  I think it is extremely important to engage these materials, both to create new language and to expand our understanding of homosexuality beyond its current Western-oriented discourse. These cultural productions encourage and support women who love women to live in relationships of love, without fear of being killed, ostracized, disowned, or beaten. 

We need more writing and other art forms on homosexuality in the continent. The more we talk about it, show images, sing songs or music, produce paintings, etc. we encourage more people to see that it is about showing homosexuals as humans. Since I am speaking out as a woman who loves women, I consider myself a dissident in the continent. Again, my approach to the question of dissidence in Africa engages not only different ways of being female, but also different ways of being queer. 

Early Puerto Rican Cinema and Nation Building: National Sentiments, Transnational Realities, 1897–1940
Naida García-Crespo
“In this groundbreaking study, the author roams knowledgeably across the fields of history, political science, and sociology…. Highly recommended.”
– CHOICE

Mikhail Bakhtin: The Duvakin Interviews, 1973
by Slav N. Gratchev and Margarita Marinova, eds.
“There are more than a few delights (and surprises) to be had from the Bakhtin presented in these interviews . . . I recommend it highly.”
– Frank Farmer, University of Kansas; The Russian Review (Vol. 79, No. 1)

Cultivating Peace: The Virgilian Georgic in English, 1650-1750
by Melissa Schoenberger
“Schoenberger’s capable and closely argued book presents an innovative reading of the Virgilian Georgic mode in English poetry of the long eighteenth century…This is a well written and cogently argued book that should be welcomed for its refreshingly new reading of the Virgilian georgic mode in English poetry of the long eighteenth century. Its strengths are many, not least, its juxtaposition of close reading with a keen sensitivity to social and political contexts.”
– The Review of English Studies, 2019

“Cultivating Peace is a compelling account of Restoration and eighteenth-century engagements with Virgil’s Georgics and with that poem’s cautious attitude toward the promise of an Augustan golden age.”
– Marvell Studies, 4.2

Don’t Whisper Too Much and Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbella
by Frieda Ekotto
Translated by Corine Tachtiris
“For the first time, two of Frieda Ekotto’s most remarkable works are being translated and bound into one volume . . . Ekotto masterfully illustrates the complex layers of African women-loving-women, which include patriarchy, violence, agency and colonialism.”
-Ms., December 2019

Fire on the Water: Sailors, Slaves, and Insurrection in Early American Literature
by Lenora Warren
“In making her argument the author marries familiar texts—such as Oloudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789), Frederick Douglass’s novella “The Heroic Slave” (1852), and Herman Melville’s Billy Budd (begun in the 1880s; first published posthumously in 1924)—and some not so familiar (e.g., John Howison’s popular and much-reprinted story “The Florida Pirates,” published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1821) and their historical context, subjecting the narratives to subtle and extensive analysis….Recommended.” 
– CHOICE, February 2020

“Fire on the Water offers a necessary reckoning with the persistent failure of the abolitionist imagination to conceive of slave insurrection as an expression of political agency and not simply as a reaction to the brutalities of the slave trade and of slave society. . . . Readers will find Fire on the Water an important contribution to the study of slavery and abolitionism. . . . Moreover, this book also makes major contributions to Black Atlantic studies and to maritime and oceanic studies at large. . . . Scholars working in these fields will find Warren’s book essential reading. They will also find the book’s clarity and concision impressive.”
– American Literary History

Machado de Assis and Narrative Theory: Language, Imitation, Art, and Verisimilitude in the Last Six Novels  
by Earl E. Fitz
“Steeped in the works of Western literature and an imaginative reader of French Symbolist poetry, Machado creates, between 1880 and 1908, a “new narrative,” one that will presage the groundbreaking theories of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure by showing how even the language of narrative cannot escape being elusive and ambiguous in terms of meaning . . . A masterwork of original and seminal scholarship that rescues a critically important Latin American writer from an undeserved obscurity, “Machado de Assis and Narrative Theory: Language, Imitation, Art, and Verisimilitude in the Last Six Novels” is enhanced for academia with the inclusion of a prefacing article (A Note on Translations), sixteen pages of Notes, a six page Bibliography, and a seven page Index. While unreservedly recommended for college and university library Latin American Literary Studies collections in general, and Machado de Assis supplemental studies lists in particular, it should be noted for students, academia, and non- specialist general readers with an interest in the subject that “Machado de Assis and Narrative Theory” is also available in a paperback edition and in a digital book format.”
– Midwest Book Review 

“Indeed, the rhythm of the novel alternates continually between self-analysis and depiction of exterior realities. It might remind us of a scenic drive, where we enjoy a rich variety of natural sights, but feel the need to stop from time to time to clean our specs. For this reason, Earl Fitz’s book should be appreciated as a complement to the many other excellent studies of Machado’s relation to a plentiful external landscape. Lest we become overly confident about our ability to know these realities, we should pause and, considering perspectives like those of this book, clean our glasses.”
– Journal of Lusophone Studies 4.2

Transmedia Creatures: Frankenstein’s Afterlives
by Francesca Saggini and Anna Enrichetta Soccio
“Saggini and Soccio’s [book] defies expectations and has a great deal to say about the pedagogical uses to which Frankenstein’s textual afterlives might be put…. Many of the essays in this volume, although they don’t define themselves that way, might be characterized by what we now call presentist in that they trace how cultural forebodings about the dangers of difference that preoccupy the novel get re-mediated in contemporary culture to address those same concerns…. All of these essays are never less than illuminating, in their varied ways, on some understudied or overlooked aspect of the novel’s afterlives, as should be obvious from the book’s title but is never a given.”
-European Romantic Review, 31:1  

Cy-Borges: Memories of the Posthuman in the Work of Jorge Luis Borges
by Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus
“A unique and often fascinating volume, Cy-Borges positions Borges as a precursor to “posthumanism,” a postmodern approach to the humanities that decenters autonomy and free will, and examines human beings as limited organisms enmeshed in networks of interlocking forces such as history, culture, technology, and biology.”
-Shipwreck Library, January 2020 

Poetic Salvage: Reading Mina Loy
by Tara Prescott
“Prescott’s Poetic Salvage wants to ease the agitation of Loy’s audience, to offer, wherever possible, ‘an in-depth exploration of Loy’s imaginary words and worlds’…Ultimately, it is precisely because of this established, celebrated lineage of close reading that Prescott can be certain that her work is a welcome addition to Loy studies, as it assuredly is.”
-Modern Language Review, Vol. 115, Part I, 2020  

Effeminate Years: Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain
by Declan Kavanagh
“What is striking throughout Effeminate Years is the sheer flexibility and
availability of the rhetoric of effeminacy. Kavanagh’s detailed, in-depth
literary analysis of what is, at times, a densely complex political discourse convincingly demonstrates the importance of antieffeminacy and homophobia to that discourse.”
– Journal of the History of Sexuality 

Jane Austen and Masculinity
by Michael Kramp
“Jane Austen and Masculinity is a welcome addition to the significant
body of work on Austen and gender…The collected essays therefore exhibit a self-conscious awareness of disciplinary developments, and the analytical frameworks and tools therein reflect those of influential predecessors.”
-Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 32, no. 2.

The Global Wordsworth: Romanticism Out of Place
by Katherine Bergren 
“Beautifully written, equally attentive to Romanticism and its afterlives, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in Romanticism and its legacies, whether scholarly or general readers. It offers a genuinely original perspective on Wordsworth and his works, without insisting on the privilege of canonicity.”
-Review 19

Don Quixote: The Re-accentuation of the World’s Greatest Literary Hero
by Slav N. Gratchev and Howard Mancing
“The range and variety of the entries in this collection will please and surprise seasoned Don Quixote scholars as well as anyone interested in the novel…The book is both a pleasure and a revelation.”
– Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Volume XCVI, No. 4

“The 17 essays in this volume, which also includes an introduction by Gratchev (Marshall Univ.) and Mancing (Purdue Univ.), take as their point of departure the concept of re-accentuation, initially proposed by Mikhail Bakhtin in The Dialogic Imagination (1975; Eng. tr., 1981). The interpretive and analytical openness of key works of prose fiction allow for re-reading and re-imagination in subsequent ages and through different media and approaches…The essays are intriguing in their range and methodologies, and they become testaments to the afterlife—what Bakhtin termed the “unfinalizability”—of Don Quixote in both public and artistic spheres.”
– E. H. Friedman, Vanderbilt University; CHOICE, 55.9 (May 2018)

Rewriting Franco’s Spain: Marcel Proust and the Dissident Novelists of Memory
by Samuel O’Donoghue
“In this engaging and illuminating study, O’Donoghue proves that despite the willed insularity of the Francoist cultural establishment Marcel Proust was well known in Spain, even before the Civil War, and had a deep, significant impact on many major writers who excelled exploring memory and self-writing…All in all, this is a superb book, clearly written, well organized and with a lively critical voice that makes it a pleasure to read.” 
– Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Volume XCVI, No. 4

Rural Revisions of Golden Age Drama: Performance of History, Performance of Space
by Elena García-Martín
“Rural Revisions of Golden Age Drama is a well-written and innovative book that demonstrates an impressive breadth of research. Its interdisciplinary focus appeals to a diverse readership. The author merits much praise for the adept and engaging way in which she challenges the reader to reconsider Spain’s Golden-Age theatrical tradition and its role in society today.”
– Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Volume XCVI, No. 3

Avenues of Translation: The City in Iberian and Latin American Writing
by Regina Galasso & Evelyn Scaramella
“…this very unique collection allows the reader to appreciate the richness of
translating Iberian and Latin American writers’ urban centers. Indeed, this
collection sheds new light on translations that are only possible in cities while also uncovering how Latin American and Iberian influencers have transformed urban spaces by leaving their own cultural and historical marks. Scholars of Iberian, Latin American, and Translation studies will gladly add this outstanding collection of essays to their list of must-read books.”
-Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 43

Uniting Blacks in a Raceless Nation: Blackness, AfroCuban Culture and Mestizaje in the Prose and Poetry of Nicolás Guillén
by Miguel Arnedo-Gómez
“From the outset, it is clear that the book is very thoroughly researched, and
that Arnedo-Gómez’s argument is firmly established within a suitable theoretical context…Overall, this book offers a very original perspective on Guillén’s work…Arnedo-Gómez is clearly an expert on the topic and his desire to fill an apparent void in the scholarship on the poet is commendable.”
-Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 43

Playing the Martyr: Theater and Theology in Early Modern France
by Christopher Semk
“…beautifully thought-out, displays effortless erudition, and has much to offer any scholar or student interested in literature, religion, or the interplay of both. Playing the Martyr is an accomplished study, liberally peppered with well-chosen and pertinent anecdotes and observations, managing to maintain that elusive balance of erudition and readability…Christopher Semk’s book is a welcome contribution to this field and proves that researchers should not overlook, nor overgeneralize, this window into the early modern period.” 
– H-France Review, June 2018

Menials: Domestic Service and the Cultural Transformation of British Society, 1650-1850
by Kristina Booker
“Kristina Booker’s Menials is an ambitious and solidly argued exploration of
the place of servants in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British
imagination. If it does not quite articulate the transformation of British society, as maintained by the subtitle, it certainly demonstrates one of the ways the British understood their culture differently over time…Booker is ultimately concerned with the ways that what she calls the “master class” maps its anxieties and concerns onto servants, both in fiction and in philosophical and political texts, as well as in the conduct literature that deals with the “servant problem.” In her view, the master class demonstrates its grip on the representation of servants, leaving little room for any signs of working-class identity or independence. Those signs, she believes, are quickly extinguished. This pessimistic view, which assumes a certain uniformity among the authors, derives in part from Booker’s use of economic perspectives; she reads literary servants in light of a trio of economic principles: self-interest, emulation, and consumption…Menials contributes substantially to the ongoing discussion of domestic servants in history and in literature. It has a strongly articulated and definitive point of view that will make it worth arguing with as well as building on.”
– Early Modern Women, Spring 2019, Vol.13, No. 2

“Booker has composed a tightly organized and argued account wherein each text is deployed in support of a neatly stated overall thesis. She has found an effective means of tracing critical cultural arguments over a long period of change, and has worked hard to isolate key themes and connect them with emblematic sources. There are no loose ends.”
– David Vincent, The Open University; Victorian Studies (61.4)

“As a new entry into this undertreated line of critical inquiry, Booker’s 2018 monograph represents a generative step forward. Well researched, accessible, and keenly incisive, Booker interweaves cultural critique and literary interpretation in an expressly cogent and provocative read…I find Menials a truly valuable and original contribution to the field. Kristina Booker is a fine writer and scholar, and her book should spark fresh conversations, both in print and in the classroom, to the profit of specialists and students alike.”  
-The Eighteenth Century Intelligencer, October 2019

Jane Austen and Masculinity 
by Michael Kramp
“This book provides thoughtful variety in its views of men and masculinity associated with Austen’s novels, all the richer for its broader considerations of contexts and aftereffects of Austen’s men.”
-The Eighteenth Century Intelligencer, October 2019

Reading Homer’s Odyssey
by Kostas Myrsiades
“The book is a great pleasure to read….Reading Homer’s Odyssey is a book that does exactly what it promises: it helps its reader to read (and understand) the Odyssey. It will appeal to a broad readership as well as to scholars and students of Classics and other fields, and it may also be suggested as accompanying reading in Classical Civilization classes or similar courses”
-Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 2019

Community and Solitude: New Essays on Johnson’s Circle
by Anthony W. Lee
“Expertly compiled and deftly edited by Anthony W. Lee, “Community and Solitude: New Essays on Johnson’s Circle” is a collection of ten essays that explores relationships between Johnson and several of his main contemporaries…In their detailed and careful examination of particular works situated within complex social and personal contexts, the essays in this volume offer a “thick” and illuminating description of Johnson’s world that also engages with larger cultural and aesthetic issues, such as intertextuality, literary celebrity, narrative, the nature of criticism, race, slavery, and sensibility…An invaluable, erudite, thoughtful and thought provoking contribution to the study of Samuel Johnson’s life, philosophy, and literary work, “Community and Solitude: New Essays on Johnson’s Circle” is an extraordinary body of informative and deftly scripted scholarship.”
-Midwest Book Review

Menials: Domestic Service and the Cultural Transformation of British
Society, 1650–1850
by Kristina Booker
“Booker is ultimately concerned with the ways that what she calls the “master class” maps its anxieties and concerns onto servants, both in fiction and in philosophical and political texts, as well as in the conduct literature that deals with the “servant problem.” In her view, the master class demonstrates its grip on the representation of servants, leaving little room for any signs of working-class identity or independence. Those signs, she believes, are quickly extinguished. This pessimistic view, which assumes a certain uniformity among the authors, derives in part from Booker’s use of economic perspectives; she reads literary servants in light of a trio of economic principles: self-interest, emulation, and consumption…Menials contributes substantially to the ongoing discussion of domestic servants in history and in literature. It has a strongly articulated and definitive point of view that will make it worth arguing with as well as building on.”
-Early Modern Women, Spring 2019, Vol.13, No. 2

Machado de Assis and Narrative Theory: Language, Imitation, Art, and Verisimilitude in the Last Six Novels
by Earl E. Fitz
“A masterwork of original and seminal scholarship that rescues a critically important Latin American writer from an undeserved obscurity, “Machado de Assis and Narrative Theory: Language, Imitation, Art, and Verisimilitude in the Last Six Novels” is enhanced for academia with the inclusion of a prefacing article (A Note on Translations), sixteen pages of Notes, a six page Bibliography, and a seven page Index…unreservedly recommended for college and university library Latin American Literary Studies collections in general, and Machado de Assis supplemental studies lists in particular.”
-Midwest Book Review 

Jane Austen and Comedy
Edited by Erin Goss
“This collection addresses a surprising lacuna in Austen studies: the relationship between her works and comedy…Their topics—respectively, Austen’s problematic ‘happy endings,’ her farcical treatment of the uncomfortable paternalism of General Tilney and Mr. Bennett, and her oddly illuminating presence in ‘monster mashup’ titles—will prove most useful in the classroom. Recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates; graduate students; general readers.”
-CHOICE, September 2019 Vol. 57 No. 1

Beyond Human: Vital Materialisms in the Andean Avant-Gardes
by Tara Daly 
“The author explains political ramifications using specific historical events illuminated by postmodern philosophical insights. All in all, the book offers an interesting explanation of the avant-garde’s powerful impact on the Andean region, pointing to productive affinities between the experience of indigenous traditions and the impulse to reject Western society. Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.”
-CHOICE, August 2019 Vol. 56 No. 12

Pretexts for Writing: German Romantic Prefaces, Literature, and Philosophy
by Seán M. Williams 
“Including excellent endnotes and an extensive bibliography, this challenging study proves that prefaces are far from perfunctory and challenges readers to reevaluate this neglected form. Recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates; graduate students.”
-CHOICE, July 2019 Vol. 56 No. 11

Effeminate Years: Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-Eighteenth Century Britain 
by Declan Kavanagh
“Though a less erotic take on gender and sexuality, Declan Kavanagh’s Effeminate Years: Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-Eighteenth Century Britain is a thoroughly modern analysis of the homosexual and homosocial legacy of the Seven Years War. Evoking Murray Pittock, Kavanagh stresses the difference between an effeminate landscape and a feminized one, staking a provocative claim for a characterization of the Celtic body politic which is both queer and male. Kavanagh’s argument is drawn along lines of public and private life: the politicization of homoerotic activity draws it into the public sphere, crystallizing anti-effeminate hostility, persecuting those found to be lacking in masculinity, and making the performance of gender a question of democracy.”
-The Year’s Work in English Studies

Reading Homer’s Odyssey
by Kostas Myrsiades
“Reading Homer’s Odyssey by Kostas Myrsiades offers a book-by-book commentary on the epic’s themes that informs the non-specialist general reader and engages the seasoned academic reader in new perspectives… An eloquently erudite and insightful analysis of one of the world’s most famous works of literature from Ancient Greece, Reading Homer’s Odyssey should be considered a core addition to both community and academic library Homeric Literature collections and supplemental curriculum studies lists.”
-Midwest Book Review 

“Myrsiades has written an extremely readable companion to Homer’s Odyssey… Careful discussions of the plot’s structure, the characters’ development, and Homer’s narrative resources illuminate the Odyssey’s poetic charm. An ample, up-to-date list for further reading is provided for each book of the poem, with a general bibliography at the end…Myrsiades’s book will be most useful for those encountering the Odyssey for the first time, though seasoned readers may also learn from it. Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.”
-CHOICE, September 2019 Vol. 57 No. 1

The Global Wordsworth: Romanticism Out of Place
by Katherine Bergren
“A model of academic excellent, this literary study of William Wordsworth upon various cultures around the world is an extraordinarily informative and thought-provoking read.” 
-Midwest Book Review 

Playing the Martyr: Theater and Theology in Early Modern France
By Christopher Semk
“Playing the Martyr is an accomplished study, liberally peppered with well-chosen and pertinent anecdotes and observations, managing to maintain that elusive balance of erudition and readability…The topic of martyrs, or more broadly hagiographic literature, has interested scholars for a couple of decades, giving rise to fresh readings of individual plays, authors, or saints. Christopher Semk’s book is a welcome contribution to this field and proves that researchers should not overlook, nor overgeneralize, this window into the early modern period.”
-Paul Scott, University of Kansas; H-France Review (18.132), June 2018

The Ladies of Llangollen: Desire, Indeterminacy, and the Legacies of Criticism
By Fiona Brideoake
“Reading this book is a delight. Brideoake deftly deflects certainty, enjoyably poking holes in centuries of scholarship and speculation. She is self-aware, noting that the desire to set aside a determination is a reaction to those same centuries of fruitless recontextualizing, reflecting a rhetorical turn away from defining subsets of queerness by what goes on behind closed doors…This is a long overdue contribution to the scholarly record, challenging first and foremost Elizabeth Mavor’s landmark 1971 biography, which positioned the Ladies as “romantic friends” who remained chaste. Brideoake’s readings of both early-life documents (chapter 1) and mythologizing texts published near the time of the Ladies’ deaths (chapter 7) are unparalleled elsewhere…It would be a value purchase for anyone invested in queer, feminist, or class history.”
-Allana Mayer, graduate of the Masters of Library and Information Studies (MLIS) program (2014) from McGill University; Eighteenth-Century Fiction (30.4), 2018

Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen
By Jocelyn Harris
“Burney scholars will find Jocelyn Harris’s latest book Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen an enriching read…Considering the fact that Frances Burney and other members of the Burney family feature prominently in [Austen’s] allusions, [Harris’] book, by extension, sheds new light on the cultural influence of the Burneys on their contemporaries…the book gives shape to an Austen who was an avid and grateful consumer of the latest gossip, scandals and satirical prints about those from whom she was never far removed: famous writers, intellectuals and actresses, big naval figures, the royal family. With a keen eye for detail, Harris exposes the subtle connections between the unrestrained, public laughter surrounding such figures and the more restricted, oblique laughter in the novels, thereby deepening our understanding of Austen’s skill for satire in the process.”
-Elles Smallegoor; Burney Letter, The Burney Society, Spring 2018 (24.1)

“Harris’s impressive new book, Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen (2017), builds on the work of her pioneering 1989 study, deepening our sense of what Austen may have been up to in crafting her novels… For readers willing to engage with the possible, and to consider links that do not, at first glance, seem probable, Harris’s well-written, deeply researched, and timely book has a great deal to offer… Harris’s arguments are highly illuminating. For years to come, readers and critics will be weighing the massive number of new insights in this book, troubling through their implications for our future readings of Austen, politics, history, and popular culture.”
-Devoney Looser, Arizona State University; The Review of English Studies

Memory, War and Dictatorship in Recent Spanish Fiction by Women
By Sarah Leggott
“In recent years, memory has come to the fore of Spanish cultural studies, inspiring a plethora of articles, conferences and books. Sarah Leggott’s oeuvre focuses on the gendered dimensions of the concepts that have dominated Spanish memory studies, such as post-memory and Republican memory, while also reconceiving the traditionally feminist subjects of the mother-daughter relationship and the absent mother as important vectors of memory transmission…This book is a welcome and original addition to the burgeoning field of memory studies, and would be suitable for college-level undergraduate and postgraduate courses. It would be of particular interest to scholars working in the fields of Hispanic gender and memory studies.”
-Lorraine Ryan, University of Birmingham; Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Volume XCV, No. 1 (2018)

Confluence Narratives: Ethnicity, History, and Nation-Making in the Americas
By Antonio Luciano de Andrade Tosta
“Anonio Luciano de Andrade Tosta has taken the field of inter-American studies in his own direction. Pioneered by Earl Fitz, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Nina Scott, Elizabeth Lowe, and Sophia McClennen (to name only a few), this approach unites the Americas through the comparative method…Tosta’s prose is clear, engaging, and jargon-free. Any class or study on inter-American literature could use this book, but also any study of authors and populations that were treated in isolation before (Japanese and African Americans) would benefit from this well-researched, fascinating, and interdisciplinary work of multicultural scholarship.”
– John Maddox, University of Alabama at Birmingham; Comparative Literature Studies, Volume 54, No. 4 (2017)

Fixing Babel: An Historical Anthology of Applied English Lexicography
Ed. by Rebecca Shapiro
“Fixing Babel: An Historical Anthology of Applied English Lexicography, edited by Rebecca Shapiro, offers an invaluable collection of the explanatory front matter written by dictionary authors from the early seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries. This unique collation, beautifully edited with instructive commentary, enables readers to grasp the shifting dynamic of descriptive and prescriptive elements used by lexicographers in documenting the ever-widening scope of English language use in the documented time frame.”
– Lowell Gallagher, University of California, Los Angeles; SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Volume 58, No. 1 (Winter 2018)

Hi! My name is Emily and I am currently a senior majoring in Literary Studies and Creative Writing.  After interning with the literary magazine on campus, West Branch, I realized that I am fascinated with all of the detail and hard work that goes into putting a book out into the world, and I am lucky to say that my last semester here on campus is going to be spent with the Bucknell University Press.  

As most book-lovers would say, books have had an enormous impact on my life.  Regardless of genre or audience, books are how we spread knowledge and empathy in our world, and I’ve always wanted to take some part in that creation process.  I want to pursue a career in publishing once I graduate in May, but for now I indulge myself by reviewing and talking about books on my blog. I also write poetry and fiction in my spare time, and would love to publish a book or two at some point in my life.

Some of my favorite books recently have been Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton, and Little Weirds by Jenny Slate. When not reading, I consume a shameful amount of podcasts.

Guest blogger Jason S. Farr, of Marquette University, concludes University Press Week with his profound and personal post on disability and perception.

When I was 29, I suddenly found myself struggling to hear professors speak in the graduate seminars I attended. Conversations with friends and classmates became minefields of misunderstanding and sources of frustration. My physician referred me to an audiologist for a hearing test. She sat me in a dark booth and placed heavy headphones over my ears. Alone and filled with anxiety, I went on to fail an impossible test: somewhat discernible beeps followed by faint beeps followed by silence and the ringing oblivion of my tinnitus. The audiologist showed me the exam’s results, a line graph which plummeted at the mid-to-high frequencies. The diagnosis shocked me: I was severely hearing impaired.

The audiologist advised me to purchase behind-the-ear hearing aids but I opted for the completely-in-canal ones because they were less visible. They would require more repairs and would be uncomfortable to wear, she warned me, but I was ashamed. To have a visible indication of diminished capacity was unthinkable to me at the time. In retrospect, I wasn’t just confronting profound cognitive disorientation due to the mechanized, digital soundscapes I was learning to process; I was reconciling myself to how people reacted when they noticed the hearing aids themselves. The question that I came to dread in casual conversation was “what happened to you?” which may as well have been, “what’s wrong with you? Why aren’t you able-bodied?” For a young man navigating the body-driven subculture of gay San Diego, hearing aids called attention to my disability, and disability was something I regarded as compromising the body I was building in the gym and on basketball courts. Coming out as gay seven years prior to all of this was grueling, but coming out as disabled offered an entirely new set of challenges. In many ways, claiming my disability was even more difficult than claiming my gayness because of how deeply embedded and unchecked ableism is in our social and medical systems.

In the face of all this, I continued through the PhD program in Literature at UC San Diego where I would soon become acquainted with disability studies. One of my professors, Michael Davidson, introduced me to this vibrant interdisciplinary field and, consequently, to new ways of thinking about myself and others. In disability studies, for instance, disability is conceived of as a social and cultural phenomenon, not merely a physical one. Disabled people are often regarded as defective. But by reading disability activists and scholars, I soon learned that disabled people are manifestations of biological and cultural diversity, impaired perhaps in our bodies and minds but ultimately constrained by the communities we navigate, by the systems of thought to which we are exposed, and even by language itself, which reinforces ableism with clichéd metaphors of blindness-as-ignorance, of deafness-as-obtuseness, and of crippling-as-inhibiting.

When it came time for me to write my dissertation, I turned to disability studies to help me understand how literature reimagines social and political structures. I began by writing about Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall, published in 1762. Scott’s utopian novel depicts a British country estate run by variably-embodied women whose utter abhorrence of heterosexuality and patriarchy is matched in intensity only by their boundless love for each other. Curiously, all of the servants of the estate, and the inhabitants that live within the estate’s walls, are what we would today call disabled—deaf, blind, maimed, short-statured, neuroatypical, and so on. What I eventually realized was that, in writing queer and disabled bodies into her narrative, Scott imagines a social order that remedies the wrongs of her day. In Scott’s utopian reckoning, variable bodies and queer intimacy work together to reform a society that prizes freak shows and treats women as property.

The book that eventually came out of my dissertation and which was recently published with Bucknell University Press, Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature, is the culmination of years of research and rewriting. It argues that Scott’s novel and other fictional narratives from the eighteenth century reveal the extent to which ableism and homophobia govern social life, but it also shows that, through the disabled and queer bodies that they imagine, authors opened up new avenues of lived experience for readers from the eighteenth century forward.

Much like the fictional characters in the novels I write about, becoming disabled has enabled me to perceive myself and the world differently. It helps me to discern more acutely the plights of the people who compose the communities I inhabit. It spurs me to try to improve these communities in my own imperfect and limited ways. I don’t want to downplay the exhaustion I feel at the end of classes and office hours, after listening as attentively as possible to the ideas, questions, and concerns of students and colleagues. But I’m also motivated and energized by my impairment. Like the fictional characters of eighteenth-century novels, my body is novel, it is extraordinary, and it is rewriting the script that was designed for me. My hearing is unwieldy, to be sure, but it is also directing me toward new social landscapes whose expansive vistas I am only just beginning to perceive.

In recognition of day #4 of UP Week, two staff members tell you what it’s really like to be part of the small but dedicated team that makes up the Bucknell University Press.

Working for the Bucknell University Press has been one of my favorite parts of my college experience. We’re a small press, which means that I’ve had the opportunity to see so many parts of the process of scholarly publishing. I’ve written contracts, interviewed authors, and helped make acquisition decisions. Of course, not all of my friends entirely understand what I do. Three years in, I still have to explain to my fellow students that no, I do not work for the university newspaper; the BUP is a real press that publishes scholarly monographs. They’re usually surprised to hear Bucknell even has a university press like we do. The BUP is truly one of our campus’s hidden gems.

–Nate Freed ’21, Bucknell University Press Presidential Fellow

I originally came Bucknell for a position as the Museum Fellow at the Samek Art Museum. I had previously worked in museums and other visual arts organizations so I was new to the publishing world when I started at Bucknell University Press. I am a lifelong book lover, so it has been great to see the publishing process from start to finish. One of my favorite parts of the job is getting to look over manuscripts. I check them for formatting issues and make notes of things that authors need to correct or sometimes I correct issues myself. Once a manuscript is ready to move forward in the publishing process, getting to assign them ISBNs is exciting as well.

–Emily Owen, M.A., Bucknell University Press Editorial Assistant

Guest blog post by BUP author Tim Wenzell in recognition of University Press Week 2019

As humanism has evolved over the centuries, it has maintained and nurtured itself through empathy—having it, expressing it, and passing it on. In the humanities and literature, passing it on through the written word, through poetry, fiction, and non-fiction has functioned as a way of inducing action through reading and thinking:

*Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle to expose the appalling working conditions in the meat-packing industry. His description of rotten and contaminated meat, and the dehumanizing treatment of immigrants, shocked the public, all the way up the ladder to President Teddy Roosevelt, and led to the busting of the beef trusts and new federal food safety laws.

*Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath as a means of communicating the flawed system of growing and distribution (refusal of crop rotation crucial to the soil for profit = Dust Bowl) present in 1930s America. Political and activist movements focusing on the plight of migrant workers arose from this increased awareness from reading this important novel. Steinbeck stated that he wrote the novel with the express intention of shaming those in power responsible for the misery of the Great Depression. Steinbeck said, ”I’ve done my damndest to rip a reader’s nerves to rags.”

*Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring and the environmental movement exploded across American consciousness, turned the light on environmental destruction for the sake of profit, and paid attention to chemicals and poison being dumped into the air and water. It was a book to which Senator Gruening remarked, “Every once in a while in the history of mankind, a book has appeared which has substantially altered the course of history.”

But can books alter history today in the same manner, or at least in the same large increments, that they did in the past? With so many books to read now, and so many ways to read them, is there not enough time left to think and act? More specifically, in the wake of Rachel Carson over half a century ago, how can we, as stewards of an environment that is rapidly collapsing on us, accomplish the task of getting the public to read, think, act?

Silent Spring was a wake-up call and frightening for sure. But do we, as would-be stewards of the environment, need to frighten in order to get the public to act? While climate change and its implications can clearly frighten, and we have been saturated by this from climatologists and ecologists, from social media to academic presses, is fear enough in the 21^st century to alter the course of history? While action is being taken to combat climate change, attention paid to these concerns has been diluted and supplanted by other threats and spectacles that take up more room in the news than a changing planet, fueling more localized fears of economic downturn, of mass shootings, of illegal immigration, among others. Because of these distractions, climate change loses its rightful place as Number One imminent threat to humanity.

This is the direction to which humanism must now gravitate: empathy toward the non-human, through an understanding that the non-human informs the human. Instead of relying solely on climatologists and ecologists delivering facts (and with them fear), another approach might be working to increase empathy. Instead of attempting to provoke thinking and action through fear of a planet turning against us by our own design, humanists are uniquely positioned to influence thought and action by teaching, writing about, and reading writers who focus on the natural world. In so doing, our students and readers may come to a more organic understanding of what is being lost. Humanists can make readers lovers of diverse cultures, but through attention to the literatures and landscapes of those cultures, rather than through fearmongering.

This was the purpose of writing and editing Woven Shades of Green: An Anthology of Irish Nature Literature (Bucknell University Press, 2019). Ireland is one small country on the planet, no bigger than the state of Maine, but culturally and historically it is much larger than that—and geographically, too, as one of the most naturally diverse and beautiful countries on the planet. Its geography has had an outsized influence on Irish culture, especially its literature. The anthology moves through time and nature to see, from a humanistic perspective, the relationship between Irish culture and the natural world, presenting a chronicle of voices from the early Irish monks in a forested Ireland to the voices of modern poets and naturalists who speak across a rapidly changing landscape of urban sprawl. All speak from a love of the natural world; this thread unites these writers as a culture and a people. Finally, a collection like this can inspire efforts toward the preservation of Ireland’s natural world; indeed, the anthology closes with a list of environmental organizations in Ireland.

As stewards of the environment, we need to provide more attention to nature literature everywhere, because it is everywhere. As a humanist, writing a book about nature literature that pertains to a particular geography is a way to zone in on environmental issues within that geography by displaying its cultural artifacts together in one place, chapter by chapter through time, as a testament to the living, breathing power of that natural world. Perhaps reading about the natural world will inspire action, fueled by empathy and a love of nature, rather than by fear. This direction in humanism is framed and defined by the non-human, by geography and change. The history and stories of humanity, told from particular landscapes in flux and in danger of disappearing, are vital. Without those particular landscapes, there is no humanism because there is no humanity.

Tim Wenzell

Associate Professor

Department of Humanities

Virginia Union University

Read posts from other presses in honor of UP Week 2019:

Oregon State University Press: http://osupress.oregonstate.edu/blog

University of Minnesota Press: http://uminnpressblog.com

University Press of Mississippi: https://www.upress.state.ms.us/News

Harvard University Press: https://harvardpress.typepad.com/hup_publicity/

University of Toronto Press: https://utorontopress.com/ca/blog

Barnes, a scholar of early modern literature and gender theory, makes use of source materials—police report, autopsy results, suicide note, and death certificate—to inform his own memories and understanding, and in so doing seeks to come to terms with his brother’s death and their complex relationship as gay siblings in a conservative Midwestern family.

Presidential Fellow Nate Freed posed the following questions to Barnes, who is also the author of Post-Closet Masculinities in Early Modern England (Bucknell University Press, 2009).

Freed: Writing The Dark Eclipse must have required a different approach from that of your last book, Post-Closet Masculinities, a traditional scholarly work. How did you find this transition from monograph to memoir-style essays? How did you conceive of these essays, and how did you think differently about style and audience while writing them?

Barnes: When I wrote Post-Closet Masculinities, I was interested in the historical construction of the concept of masculinity as a (seemingly) stable identity in western culture. My desire to write the book was born out of an intellectual curiosity from having read Shakespeare’s plays and the metaphysical poets like John Donne. But this intellectual desire was also informed by my personal experience of having grown up in a family of seven boys and one girl. My familial experience, that is, had intuitively taught me that there were unspoken rules about being masculine—rules to do with emotional output and behavioral codes—although as a kid these rules didn’t feel natural to me. In many ways I was the antithesis of the masculine ideal that reigned in my family. I don’t know if this feeling of not belonging in that hyper-masculine family came from being a gay kid—a sissy, really—growing up in a conservative Catholic, male-dominated family, or if having a creative personality in a family of practical business-minded people made me more sensitive to the brutal nature of masculinity. Either way, I’d always struggled with my place in such a family and so my intellectual pursuit in Post-Closet Masculinities was to satisfy that question of how one performs that kind of masculinity that I’d witnessed growing up, a performance that I wasn’t able to claim.

As a student in a doctoral program, I was taught that the personal or the emotional is suppressed in order to engage the intellectual, to prove, really, that the research you conduct is unbiased, which is an impossible thing to do. As scholars and intellectuals our desires obviously inform our pursuits although we are taught to hide those desires—at least this is the lesson I took from being a scholar and an intellectual.

While I was researching this book, I was hired as the Dean of the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. As a liberal arts college embedded in an art and design institute, we were outsiders in every way, and thus as a school we were allowed—or we decided—to ignore the ways such divisions are supposed to behave in the academy. We made up our own rules. This freedom came from the art and design ethos that drove Pratt. This ethos also had a profound effect on how I saw myself as an academic. It allowed me to put aside that notion that a scholar must suppress the personal in order to highlight the intellectual.

In 2015, I decided to get my MFA in Creative Writing to help me with this transition. The research and the research methodologies I used to write The Dark Eclipse were informed by my doctoral training although the narrative arc of the book is informed by my MFA. I think that I achieved what I wanted to achieve; that is, to write a book whose emotional content comes first and whose intellectual premise comes second —the exact reverse of what I was taught to do as a scholar.

Freed: How did you find the craft of life writing? Was there any aspect of tackling this sort of writing that you found surprising, perhaps surprisingly difficult?

Barnes: While promoting this book, people consistently asked me if I had a hard time revealing such personal information and painful events. They also told me that I was brave for writing this book. I didn’t find it difficult nor did I consider myself brave, primarily because I have always been a person who needed to tell my story. I did find that writing about my brother Mike and his suicide was as painful as when I experienced the event itself over 25 years ago. The painful memories were just as sharp writing this book as they were back in 1993 when I traveled to New York to identify his body.

Freed: What has the response been that you’ve received? Was it what you expected and/or, perhaps, hoped?

Barnes: The response to this book has been great, and surprising. First, I realized that many people have had to experience the loss of a loved one through suicide, and that loss is often not discussed because suicide is still taboo. Many people thanked me for writing the book because it allowed them to deal with their own experiences with suicide. 

I was also surprised that many people came up to me and told me their deepest secrets about loved ones who’d died, or about their own attempts at suicide. At first, I was taken aback by their frankness, but then I realized that they were entrusting me with secrets they hadn’t told anyone else because they felt a bond between us. Eventually, I realized that as a memoirist I had a responsibility to accept my readers’ responses even if they made me uncomfortable. That is, I felt an obligation to listen to their stories because they had invested their time and money in reading my stories.

Freed: You write detailed scenes with specific dialogue throughout The Dark Eclipse. How much of this dialogue was literally spoken, and how much is paraphrasing?

Barnes: This question is the question that memoirists have to tackle, and each of us has to answer it in our own ways. I know writers and teachers—some of my own teachers—who insist that dialogue in memoir must be completely accurate to the actual event. I know other writers and teachers—some of my teachers, as well—who believe that dialogue in memoir must be true to the emotional content of the scene, but without being made out of whole cloth. I align with this second group more than the first because memory necessarily plays with the accuracy of past events. 

However, in The Dark Eclipse, there are dialogues that I am certain are completely accurate to the event, especially events that were imprinted so firmly in my hippocampus. For example, the scenes in the book at the morgue and at the lunch after my parents and I identified my brother’s body are 100% accurate. I can never forget those words. For other scenes in the book that contain dialogue, I relied on my memory of the event to capture the emotional essence of that event and used dialogue to relay that emotion as best as I could.

Freed: How did you decide the order in which to place the different essays in The Dark Eclipse?

Barnes: One aspect of the book that I like is that there is a narrative arc that is pretty straight-forward: my brother Mike committed suicide; I travelled to New York with my parents to identify his body; my parents claimed his body and buried it back in our home state, even though I was certain Mike wouldn’t have wanted that. Decades later, at the behest of a therapist, I decide to find out the facts of Mike’s death by looking at the documents that surround his death—the police report, the autopsy, Mike’s account of his illnesses, the death certificate—and other documents that informed my relationship with Mike—the coming out letter, the movie “Prospero’s Book” (which is its own kind of document), and Edith Wharton’s novel “The House of Mirth,” which helped me to understand Mike’s suicide when suicide—and certainly Mike’s suicide—seem impossible to understand. Thus the narrative arc follows the on two tracks: the suicide event from 1993, and my desire to uncover the facts of that event in 2015.

So, the structure of the book is determined firstly by the narrative arc, and secondly by a weaving together of the official and personal documents in the timeframe in which they were produced or in the order I encountered them.

Freed: The jacket copy states that “[You have] not been able to let [your brother Mike] go. This book is [your] attempt to do so.” Would you say that The Dark Eclipse was successful in allowing you to let Mike go?

Barnes: During the two months of radio interviews that I did for this book—interviews that can be heard on my website drawbarnes.com—interviewers consistently asked me this question. I’ve thought about this question a lot, and I think the best way to describe what happened to me in writing this book and putting it out in the world is that it allowed me to cordon Mike into a specific area of my brain, of my memory, where I allow him to live without interfering with my everyday life, which used to be the case. This was especially true when I went through difficult periods of my life and Mike was ever-present as a dangerous example of how I could end the suffering I was then going through. That is, he was a kind of seductive presence, a voice in my head that said I could simply commit suicide and thus end the pain I was going through, as I assume he decided to do. In writing this book, I’ve been able to relegate him and that suicidal voice to a specific area of my memory where it is allowed to live without influencing the way I life my life today.